It's ironic that the man
who personified the Palestinian movement was neither born in the region
it claims, nor conforms to his
own organization's definition of Palestinian identity. Yassir
Arafat, whose real name is Abdel-Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat
al-Qudwa al-Husseini, was born in August 1929
in
Cairo, son of an Egyptian textile merchant. He
was sent to Jerusalem as a small child after his mother died, then
returned to Egypt via Gaza.

Throughout his career,
Arafat's Egyptian background was a political impediment and source of
personal embarrassment. One biographer notes
that upon first meeting him in 1967, 'West Bankers did not like his
Egyptian accent and ways and found them alien,' and to the very end
Arafat employed an aide to translate his Egyptian dialect into
Palestinian Arabic for conversing with his West Bank and Gaza subjects.

As a young man, Arafat
took no part in the formative experience of the Palestinian movement ― the 1948 Arab-Israeli war
― but he would nonetheless claim refugee status
throughout his life: 'I am a refugee,' he cried out in a 1969
interview, 'Do you know what it means to be a refugee? I am a poor and
helpless man. I have nothing, for I was expelled and dispossessed of my
homeland.' (Arafat's
congenital
lying would continue for decades.)

FATAH
AND THE PLO

In the mid-1950s, Arafat
joined the
Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt, then rose to the head of the Palestine
Student Union at the University of Cairo. In the late 1950s Arafat
moved to Kuwait,
where he co-founded Fatah ('Palestine National Liberation Movement' ― an
acronym
meaning 'conquest'), the faction that would later gain control over the
entire Palestinian movement. Fatah's motley ranks of Islamists,
communists and pan-Arabists expanded via brute violence. 'People aren't
attracted to speeches, but rather to bullets,' Arafat quipped at this
stage. (At right: Fatah logo of rifles and grenades over Israel)

Fatah began military-style
training in Syria and Algeria in 1964, and the following year tried
unsuccessfully to blow up a major Israeli water pump. Fatah's stated
goal was the obliteration of the State of Israel, and well before the
1967 war would supply a pretext, Arafat's organization repeatedly
attacked Israeli buses, homes, villages and rail lines.

This
violence against Israeli civilians was a pillar of the
Palestinian
National Covenant (the foundational charter of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization - PLO), which states that 'the liberation of
Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence' and that
'armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine and is therefore
a strategy and not a tactic.' (Despite repeated Palestinian commitments
in the late 1990s to annul these sections of the covenant, it was never
officially changed.)

Arafat's public profile got a
boost in 1968, when the IDF raided a Fatah terrorist stronghold in the
Jordanian village of al-Karameh. The
uniformed,
keffiyah-clad Arafat took this opportunity to project himself as a
fearless Arab leader who, despite the post-Six Day War gloom, dared to
confront the Israelis. The image stuck, and Fatah's numbers swelled
with new recruits.

Arafat and Fatah
consolidated power through bribery, extortion and murder, and at the
Palestinian National Congress in Cairo in February 1969, Arafat was
appointed head of the PLO
― a position he would never
relinquish.

JORDAN,
LEBANON AND TUNISIA

By the late 1960s,
heavily-armed, Arafat-led Palestinians had formed a terrorist 'state
within a state' in Jordan, not only attacking Israeli civilian targets,
but also seizing control of Jordanian infrastructure.

The tension reached a height
during late 1970, when Jordan's King Hussein cracked down on the
Palestinian factions. During this bloody conflict, known as
'Black
September', Palestinians hijacked four Western airliners and blew
one up on a Cairo runway (pictured at right), to both embarrass
the Egyptians and Jordanians and, in their words, 'teach the Americans
a lesson for their long-standing support of Israel.' With the broad
publicity this generated, Arafat had hit the world stage.

When King Hussein drove
Arafat's faction out of his Jordanian kingdom (causing thousands of
civilian deaths), they relocated in Lebanon. As in Jordan, Arafat soon
triggered a bloody civil war in his previously stable host country.
Simultaneously, the PLO launched intermittent attacks on Israeli towns
from southern Lebanese positions.

Yassir Arafat then brought
the high-profile terrorist act to western soil. In Sept. 1972,
Fatah-backed
terrorists kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich
Olympic games. And in 1973, Arafat
ordered
his operatives in the Khartoum, Sudan office of Fatah to abduct and
murder US Ambassador Cleo Noel and two other diplomats. (In 2004, the
FBI finally opened an
official
investigation against Arafat for the Khartoum murders.)

The
wanton violence fueled Arafat's political goals, as his presence on the
world stage grew: In 1974, he became the first representative of
a
nongovernmental organization to address a plenary session of the UN
General Assembly (pictured at left) In the speech,
with a gun holster strapped to his hip, Arafat compared himself to
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Arab heads of states declared
the PLO the sole legitimate representative of all Palestinians, the PLO
was granted full membership in the Arab League
in 1976, and by 1980 was fully recognized by European nations.

In 1978-82, the IDF
invaded Lebanon to root out PLO groups that had continually
terrorized the northern Israeli populace. The U.S. brokered a
cease-fire deal in which Arafat and the PLO were allowed to leave
Lebanon; Arafat and the PLO leadership eventually settled in Tunisia,
which remained his center of operations until 1993.

During the 1980s, Arafat
received financial assistance from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, which
allowed him to rebuild the battered PLO. This was particularly useful
during the first
Palestinian intifada in 1987 ― Arafat
took control of the violence from afar, and it was mainly due to Fatah
forces in the West Bank that the anti-Israel terror and civil unrest
could be maintained. Arafat would then become nearly the only world
leader to support Saddam Hussein in the
1991
Gulf War. (Saddam would later repay this loyalty by sending $25,000
checks to families of Palestinian suicide bombers.)

THE
PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY

In
the early 1990s, the U.S. led Israel and the PLO to negotiations that
spawned the 1993 Oslo
Accords, an agreement that called for the implementation of
Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a five-year
period. The following year Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
along with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

In 1994, Arafat moved his headquarters to the West Bank and Gaza to run
the Palestinian Authority, an entity created by the Oslo Accords.
Arafat brought with him from Tunisia an aging PLO leadership that would
bolster his ongoing monopoly over all Palestinian funds, power and
authority.
Elections
in 1996 extended Arafat's control over the PA, but under the Oslo
agreement, the term of that candidacy ended in 1999. Arafat never
allowed new elections to take place.

While Israel went about
implementing its side of the Oslo agreements ―
removing troops from nearly all Palestinian areas, recognizing the PA,
and educating for peace ― the PA utterly
failed to live up to its commitment to renounce and uproot anti-Israel
terrorism. Instead, unprecedented
incitement from Arafat's official PA media and school textbooks,
and active and passive PA support for terrorist groups led to a string
of suicide bombings in the mid-1990s that killed scores of Israeli
civilians. In October, 1996, at the height of the Oslo years, Arafat
cried out to a Bethlehem crowd, 'We know only one word - jihad! Jihad,
jihad, jihad! Whoever does not like it can drink from the Dead Sea or
from the Sea of Gaza.' [For more on the failure of Oslo, see
HonestReporting's documentary film,
Relentless.]

In July 2000, U.S. president
Bill Clinton attempted to keep the Oslo Accords viable by convening a
summit at Camp
David between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. There, Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in Gaza
and 92% of the West Bank, and a capital in East Jerusalem
― the most generous offer ever
from an Israeli government. Yassir Arafat rejected the offer and ended
negotiations without a counteroffer. As
American envoy
Dennis
Ross concluded, 'Arafat could not accept Camp David... because when
the conflict ends, the cause that defines Arafat also ends.' [See also
this
interview with Ross on Oslo.]

Immediately following this breakdown, the PA media machine under
Arafat's control ramped up the war rhetoric, and
preparations were made for riots that were unleashed following Ariel
Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount. The Arafat-supported 'al Aqsa intifada'
would continue for four years. This
unprecedented
wave of anti-Israel terrorism, which would result in over 1,000
Israeli deaths, was marked by over 120 Palestinian suicide bombers and
the growth of an Islamic martyrdom cult.

This
stage of violence revealed that Arafat and the PA had never abandoned
their longstanding plans to liquidate the Jewish state. Arafat had told an Arab
audience in Stockholm in 1996, 'We plan to eliminate the State of
Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life
unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population
explosion... We Palestinians will take over everything, including all
of Jerusalem.' Likewise, Arafat
explained to a South African crowd in 1994 that the Oslo
agreement was merely a tactical ruse in the larger battle to destroy
the Jewish state ― a modern version of
the Muslim prophet Mohammed's
trickery against the ancient tribe of Quraysh. Arafat's colleague
Faisal
al-Husseini was even more explicit, describing the Oslo process as
a 'Trojan Horse' designed to promote the strategic goal of 'Palestine
from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea' ― that is, a
Palestine in place of Israel.

TERRORIST
TO THE END

The
final phase in Arafat's life-long commitment to organized terror was
channeled through the al-Aqsa Martyrs'
Brigade, a Fatah group that was responsible for many of the most
deadly attacks against Israeli civilians between 2000-2004. Though many
media outlets described a mere
'loose
affiliation' between Arafat and this terrorist group, the evidence
clearly indicated a direct financial and organizational bond between
the two:

▪ In November, 2003 a
BBC
investigation found that up to $50,000 a month was
funneled by

An
ammunition bill for the terrorist Al Aqsa Brigade, signed by Yassir
Arafat - see larger
version

Fatah, with Arafat's approval, directly to the Al Aqsa Brigades, for
the purpose of organizing bombings, snipings and ambushes against
Israeli civilians.

▪ The leader of the Al Aqsa Brigades in
Tulkarm told USA Today on March 14, 2002: 'The truth is, we are Fatah,
but we didn't operate under the name of Fatah...We are the armed wing
of the organization. We receive our instructions from Fatah. Our
commander is Yasser Arafat himself.'

In January 2002, the Israeli Navy seized a
Gaza-bound, PA-owned freighter ― the
Karine
A― that was loaded with more
than fifty tons of Iranian ammunition and weapons, including dozens of
surface-to-surface Katyusharockets. (See
more on the Karine A.)

In June 2002,
upon recognizing Arafat's ongoing financing and abetting of terrorism,
U.S.
President
Bush called for Arafat's removal from power. Progress toward peace
required, according to Bush, 'a new and different Palestinian
leadership...not compromised by terror.'Release
of a U.S.-backed 'road
map' for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was
therefore delayed until such a new Palestinian leader emerged. On its part, the Israeli government chose to
isolate Arafat in his Ramallah compound, the 'Muqata', where he would
remain from early 2002 until his final days, and where his burial is
expected to occur.

In April 2003, hours after Mahmoud
Abbas assumed the role of Palestinian prime minister,
the official road map was released and diplomatic progress began. But
Arafat consistently
undercut the authority of Abbas, leading to Abbas' resignation and
the halting of the road map peace process.

CORRUPTION, AUTOCRACY, JIHAD

Over the course
of his 'revolutionary' career,Arafat siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars
of international aid money intended to reach the Palestinian people.

Estimates of the
degree of Arafat's wealth differ, but are all staggering: In 2003,
Forbes
magazine listed Arafat in its annual list of the wealthiest 'Kings,
Queens and Despots,' with a fortune of 'at least $300 million.'
Israeli
and
US
officials estimate Arafat's personal holdings between $1-3
billion.

And while the average Palestinian
barely
subsisted, Arafat's wife Suha (at left) in Paris received
$100,000 each month from PA sources as reported on
CBS'
60 Minutes. That CBS report also noted that Arafat maintained
secret investments in a Ramallah-based Coca Cola plant, a Tunisian
cellphone company, and venture capital funds in the U.S. and the Cayman
Islands.

Arafat also used
foreign aid funds to pay off cronies who bolstered his autocracy: An
International
Monetary Fund report indicated that upwards of 8% ($135 million) of
the PA's annual budget was handed out by Arafat 'at his sole
discretion.' And Arafat's select
PA
policemen, far from keeping the peace, were repeatedly among the
suicide bombers and snipers.

Money was just
one method of strengthening Arafat's power apparatus. Critics of his PA
government were routinely imprisoned, tortured or beaten. One example:
In 1999, Muawiya Al-Masri, a member of the Palestinian Legislative
Council, described Arafat's corruption to a Jordanian newspaper. For
this, he was attacked by a gang of masked men and shot three times.
Al-Masri survived the ordeal and described
Arafat's grip on PA power: 'There is no institutional process.
There is only one institution ― the Presidency, which has no law and
order and is based on bribing top officials.'

From
2000-2004, Arafat permitted Muslim imams to incite unprecedented
anti-Israel and
anti-American
violence from their mosques and through official PA media. Arafat's
Religious Affairs Ministry
employed
preachers who regularly called for children to 'martyr themselves',
and PA television
glamorized the act of suicide bombing.

Under Arafat, the Palestinian Authority
school
textbooksdenied
Israel's very existence, and jihad was presented to Palestinian
children as an admirable course of action. The Jewish people,
meanwhile, was represented to schoolchildren as a tricky, greedy and
barbarous nation.

Freedom of the
press was
virtually
non-existent during Arafat's reign in Gaza, Jericho and Ramallah ―
if it didn't speak favorably of Arafat, it didn't get printed in the PA-controlled media.
Moreover, the PA enacted a systematic policy of intimidation of foreign
journalists. One case among many: When an AP cameraman captured footage
of Palestinian street celebrations following the 9/11 attacks, he was
kidnapped, brought to a PA security office, and Arafat's
cabinet
secretary threatened that the PA 'cannot guarantee [his] life' if
the footage was broadcast.

Yet beyond the terrorism, extortion,
embezzlement and intimidation lies Arafat's most unfortunate ongoing
impact: The inculcation of murderous values in an entire generation of
Palestinians, who have been educated ― under Arafat's direction ―
to continue the fight of jihad against Israel, rather than compromise
to end the decades-long conflict.